Twentynine Palms, July 2011

Page 7: The Dance of the Quarks and Leptons

Got up and didn’t even want to look at the damn camera.

Pshit.

But the persistent humidity that has so far dogged my entire stay out here seems at last to have departed.

Ahhh…………

The morning chill has finally arrived.

And it feels deliciously good, and doubly so after what has gone before.

The haze of heat and humidity has lifted, and the air is once again nice and clear, and Mount San Gorgonio is finally clearly visible on the far west horizon.

Newt’s up early, and we’re gonna head on out to the Amboy lava flow to grab a truck-bed full of rocks.

Down Amboy Road, and in places, here and there, there’s actual standing water left over from the rains I was photographing yesterday.

Everybody gets it but Sunvale Road.

Ah well.

Up and across the Sheephole Pass, and the intervening valley, and distant mountains behind the town of Amboy are still plagued by the persistent haze that has betrayed the presence of the high humidity we’ve been “enjoying” so far.

Hopefully, it’ll stay over on this side of the mountains and leave things alone in Twentynine Palms.

Round a bend, and Amboy Crater comes into view, squat and black.

We’ll not be going that far, and in fact, we’re going to be turning left toward the lava flow before we even get properly clear of the calcite mining area down in the bottom of the dry lake bed.

Slow down, mind the turn, and proceed with caution, looking for any hidden signs that enough water has fallen from the sky to render the solid ground into a nightmare semi-slurry of mud and sand.

This is no place I’d like to get buried up to the floorboards in, and have to walk out of during the midday heat.

But the water that fell in this particular location was only just enough to congeal the thinnest scrim of dirt up on top, and is doing a handsome job of keeping the dust down, and nothing more than that.

Tra la la.

Drive over to the toe of the lava flow, park the truck, put on the gloves, and head on over to the exposed rock.

Amboy Lava Flow
With stuff growing right up out of the rock.
How's that work?

It’s black basalt, nice and vesicular, and sharply angular. This would be a’a lava, and the stuff is most very user unfriendly.

Do not stumble and fall down upon it, as it would open you up in a hundred different places, all of which would be ragged, bloody, and unpleasant.

So we walk with care, looking for pieces that are large enough to be of sensible use in extending the low walls that define the driveway, but not too large to pick up and walk over to the truck with and place in the bed.

Couple of old men out under the desert sun, poaching black lava.

A sight to behold, I’m sure.

In a surprisingly short time, we’ve got the bed filled up to the point where the truck does not really want to be loaded down anymore, and we hop back in and return to from whence we came.

Back to the house, park the truck in the driveway where the growing wall stops, remove all the lava, and place it with care, and the wall grows a few feet farther down toward the gate.

At this pace, it will be a while, but the desert is well endowed with patience, and who’s in a hurry anyway?

Back I go to do battle with the befouled detector inside my camera, and the sonofabitch does NOT want to cooperate.

I finally wind up taking an impromptu cleaning kit back to the trailer, and after multiple frustrating iterations of merely moving the debris around, I finally realize that the camera needs a professional cleaning, and I’m now wondering if even that is going to sort things out permanently. Somewhere along the line, the dust and debris that’s always hanging in the air out here, and is always getting into everything, no matter how hard you work to prevent it, has gotten inside the camera and I’m worried that it’s there to stay. Changing lenses in the field out here carries very real risks. Risks that I don't think I properly appreciated until now, now that it just might be too late. I can clean the detector, take a few good frames, and then, every single time, the spots and splotches begin to reappear on the shots I take, and then grow and multiply. Apparently, there’s enough crud inside the body of the camera, that simply picking it up, and taking shots with it, is more than enough to dislodge minute specks, some of which must wind up on the detector.

Feh.

I’ll keep on taking pictures, and I'll keep on running the imaging software to de-spot my shots after I take them, but this might be the end of anything useful until I get the camera properly cleaned by a professional.

Shit, and double shit.

Oh well, such are the ways of physical possessions.

Sometimes we outlive the stuff, and sometimes the stuff outlives us, but we never really own anything, even the stuff we own. It’s all just passing through, on its way to somewhere else. The quarks and leptons all dance together in a sea of energy for a while, but the dance troupe must eventually disband, all at once or just a few, here and there, now and then, and a new dance is begun elsewhere, elsewhen.

The balance of the day is spent working on the web pages that the words I’ve written and the pictures I’ve taken will turn into.

It’s a long slow process, but a rewarding one when you see something you like begin to take sensible shape before your very eyes. There’s a lot to be said for the creative process, whether that which gets created is any good or not.

In the evening we take a walk into the creosote, and afterwards I screw up the courage to look at the raft of photographs I’d taken earlier in the day, after Newt and I had finished with the lava.

It was more improbable-looking clouds and just a few other tidbits, and I was very disinclined to see what would have been a few sweet shots ruined by some gob of crud or other.

Looks like I may have gotten lucky.

The crud was there, but for the most part it was in places that would make it feasible to de-spot the images.